Month: December 2012

I was going to respond to Laurie Pennies article about prostitution, and then I heard she was getting gip, so I refrained, this is an extract of an email about the article which will have to do. It’s badly punctuated, it was written in a hurry, but it’ll do.

” The climate has changed and I think the debate about prostitution is fundamentally changing. Escort agencies currently have waiting lists, and the poverty in last few years mean people want to evaluate sex industry as it is, not as it should be. While the broadsheets seem to be spending a lot of time almost normalising the sex industry for young middle class white students, there are sections of women in our population, where social policy has assumed their body as commoodities to be exchanged for money. By marriage or whoredom or within the context of poverty and the effects, It doesn’t get mentioned. Lord Freud wants lone parents as entrepreneurs, and IDS is ignoring warnings that reform will push women into prostitution. At the mo, the sex industry is a really dangerous place, from the girls being exploited at local level, to very highly paid sex work, not just because of the law, but because it is men buying women who don’t have much choice to do things that they wont do to ‘real women’, and there is a lot of dishonesty by a lot of people for a lot of reasons, good and bad, about what happens in a room with a man who has bought you, and an industry and culture formed around the market of mens needs. I think feelings are high on the issue and I think as the summer has unfolded with the realisation of how dangerous patriarchy is to women, we are also now in a Britain where poverty as violence is being used to coerce women into the sex industry and discussion about choice is difficult in these circumstances, with the issue as it is.”

The market in education meant a market in women’s bodies. The welfare cuts meant a market in womens bodies. The social work cuts meant an expansion to the market for young men, women, and childrens bodies.